Faced with an increasingly difficult challenge in growing both average revenue per user (ARPU) and numbers of subscribers, wireless carriers are trying to develop a host of new products, services, and business models based on data services. One such service is location services, which provide information specific to a location. It is expected that location based services will generate additional business for the carrier, from both the mobile user and content providers.
For the mobile user as well as the service provider (wireless carriers and content provider), location-based services offer many opportunities. For example, location-based services can increase revenue of the service provider, e.g., network carrier and content provider, while improving services to end users, e.g., mobile users. Some examples of location-based services that can be provided to the mobile user include:                Providing the nearest business or service, such as an ATM or restaurant;        Providing alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jam; and        Providing weather reports which are germane to the location where the user is currently located, etc.        
For the network carrier, location-based services provide value add by enabling services such as:                Resource tracking with dynamic distribution (e.g., Taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling);        Finding people or information for the user (e.g., person by skill (doctor), business directory, navigation, weather, traffic, room schedules, stolen phone, emergency 911);        Proximity-based notification (push or pull) (e.g., targeted advertising, buddy list, common profile matching (dating), automatic airport check-in); and        Proximity-based actuation (push or pull) (e.g., payment based upon proximity.        
While the potential of these services is obviously great, and there is a considerable amount of interest with respect to these services, there are a number of issues that have to date limited the actual rollout and deployment of these services. These issues include for example,                Wireless service providers have not yet determined the appropriate authorization model around these services, in order to protect consumer privacy and conform to a rapidly evolving regulatory environment;        There are challenges being faced by the wireless service provider community with respect to the actual revenue generating services to roll out and the priority with which this should happen;        External content providers who hold the keys to content are hesitant to allow service providers access to top tier content (e.g., movies and music, etc.), preferring to maintain their existing relationships with their subscribers; and        Location platforms (i.e., network carrier equipment used to pinpoint location of user) which are centrally housed in carrier networks (especially in current 3G networks) have known issues with respect to throughput, latency, in terms of actual location transactions, etc. Also, cell sector dips (manner in which to determine user locations (either coarse or fine granularity)) are expensive, with precise fixes even more resource expensive.        
In addition, for purposes of location based services, external content providers typically request location from the carrier domain on a transactional basis. For example, a weather service content provider would typically request location information pertaining to a subscriber as soon as a request was received from the handset, resulting in addition latency received by this request from a subscriber perspective. It is also known that the process for a third party to gain access to a carrier's location platform is a long and expensive process because the third party has to build the integration infrastructure and the carrier must set up their location platform to accept and throttle the requests. There is also a certification and shakeout period, which can be an expensive and slow process.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.